Mainstream, action-oriented leadership thinkers tend to hate the idea of consensus, opting instead for rapid-fire, quick-decision meetings. The efficiency of pushing quickly for a clear path forward is hard to resist; however, it often steps over or forces underground the kind of resistance that will kill a new idea or initiative — but usually not until most of the time and money are spent.

Vistage, a worldwide facilitator of private advisory groups for CEOs, senior executives and business owners, has announced the first chief executive group in northwest Arkansas, led by Terry Bowen, Vistage chair and co-founder and CEO of Sew in Heaven LLC of Fayetteville.

Every year, aspiring singers participate in auditions for the New York Metropolitan Opera. Judges provide feedback to each of the singers. Most of the conversations were great examples of powerful feedback, delivered with skill and impact.

Anyone who runs a business is familiar with how easy it is to spend every day heads down in the business. But the same efficiency a leader gains with day-to-day operation also leads to tunnel vision. A leader can easily become isolated as well as stale.

Listening is hard. Like most things that we all do, there are levels of mastery that are only available to those who practice and train. Here then is a quick overview and some suggestions about how to become a better listener.

Last month, all over the country, we experienced a change in leadership. With the elections behind us, new leaders stepped into roles in all branches of government. As is the case with new corporate leaders, the first weeks show us a lot about how our new political leaders will lead.

If you could, like Shakespeare’s Henry V, walk anonymously in the hallways and meeting rooms of your business, what stories would you hear? Are they focused on historical challenges or on where the company is headed? Are they stories about what the organization can create or on limitations and problems from historical habits or even failures?

It does seem to me that having leadership skills is one of those areas in which women still have to be better than men in order to be recognized, because men can still get away with demanding followership without immediately being written off as bossy.

A CEO can delegate just about everything except culture. And every company will have a culture, whether it just happens or is implemented purposefully and continually by leadership in every decision and hire.

We all make mistakes. Some are simple and practical, but as leaders we can screw up in visible, expensive and very painful ways. I have recently had the opportunity to experience firsthand the impact of a very personal screw-up (mine, I am afraid), which took me back to some best practices I have learned over the years for dealing with mistakes.

In the end, listening became the proverbial superpower that most of us thought had the greatest impact on leadership. From a first blush perspective, this seems fairly ho-hum. After all, we listen all the time, right?

As it turns out, all of Isaac Newton’s laws of motion apply to human behavior — and especially to leading change. So, with apologies to the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, of which Sir Isaac was a member, here is my spin on Newton’s three laws of motion as they apply to people and organizations.

Here was the scene. About 250 unhappy travelers were all gathered in a crowded departure lounge. Weather and traffic snarls on the East Coast were playing havoc with getting equipment and people where they needed to be. Here are some powerful lessons in personal presence as modeled by a Delta pilot on a stormy night in Atlanta.

A succession plan includes the development required to prepare up-and-coming talent to move into that next job. Better yet, you could expand the idea to drive a next generation of leaders at all levels of the organization.